Join your geospatial colleagues in suburban Pittsburgh at Range Resources' offices in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Sept. 15-16, for two days of GIS presentations. This year's keynote, "Telling a Great Story with Data," will be delivered by Quan Vu of Tableau Software. Day 2 of the conference will be anchored by Tony Simental, West Virginia State GIS Coordinator and Susan Pool of the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Tony and Susan will be speaking on energy-related GIS projects at the geological survey.

New this year — join the EnerGIS organizing committee and your fellow GIS enthusiasts after day 1 of the conference on the Range Resources' patio for our first EnerGIS social. Hoist a cold one, talk shop — or not — and meet with fellow attendees and our generous sponsors.

Papers to be presented this year include talks on: GIS for wind power policy, analysis of aerial LiDAR data, use of APIs to increase the capabilities of your workflows, web based GIS applications for electrical transmission, automated well pad and field planning, cloud based technologies, data quality control, among others.

Smart meters trapped between benefits and dangers, claims ForbesSmart Grid NewsJust when you think it's safe to go back in the water, the smart meter debate has been elevated to the national level by several publications, including Forbes. Smart meter installations in the United States are expected to progress steadily over the next 10 years. That is because they offer a range of benefits to both utilities and their customers. Even so, smart meter deployments are facing opposition by a small group of activists.

GPS industry breathes sigh of reliefGPS WorldThe U.S. Federal Communications Commission convened a June 20 workshop on "GPS Protection and Receiver Performance" whose bite turned out to be far less than its bark had led some in the GPS industry to fear. The hastily assembled workshop — three weeks notice was given — appeared at first notice to derive from the call for "GPS receiver performance standards" that was one of the outcomes of the LightSquared controversy of 2012.

Why Philadelphia's first chief data officer quitTechnical.lyAfter a year-and-a-half, Mark Headd, Philadelphia's first chief data officer, believed it was no longer possible for him to carry out the mayor's open data policy. During his tenure, the city had released more than 50 datasets. But, according to Headd, when he tried to push the open data needle a little bit further and get one city agency to share an important dataset with other agencies, he came up empty.

Foursquare to begin charging feesThe Wall Street JournalFoursquare Labs Inc. said it would begin charging some businesses for access to its database of restaurants, shops and other local venues, as it tries to make money from information it has gathered from user "check-ins" in the five years since its founding. The New York startup is negotiating with the heaviest users of its data to pay fees or offer services in return, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Glueck said.

Commonwealth frames: Rescued archive images and mapsBBCA collection of 1.5 million photographs, maps and other materials relating to the Commonwealth have been rescued from a defunct museum in Bristol, England. The images were taken for the Directorate of Overseas Surveys from the 1940s until the 1990s, and show communities and landscapes in 55 countries.

How NASA builds a space laserDirections Magazine To build a satellite that will measure all the bumps and dips of our dynamic Earth, engineers started with a black box, built of a composite honeycomb material to make it as light as possible. The structure was precisely manufactured with an opening to allow lasers to beam to Earth, and other windows sized for a telescope that will capture photons that bounce off our planet and return to the satellite.

The map of Native American tribes you've never seen beforeNPRFinding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. But centuries of forced relocation, disease and genocide have made it difficult to find where many Native American tribes once lived. Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans.